Re: regexp question: match anything but not a group?

[Thorsten Jolitz]

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:

> Am 01.04.2014 23:30, schrieb Thorsten Jolitz:
>>
>> Hi List,
>>
>> how can I write a regexp that acts like e.g.
>>
>> ,------
>> | ".*?"
>> `------
>>
>
> BTW looks wrong. .* might much nothing, if non-greedy it remains
> nothing (?)

But it still seems valid to protect against greedyness?

,---------------------------------------------------------------------
| '*?', '+?', '??'
|     These are "non-greedy" variants of the operators '*', '+' and '?
|     '. Where those operators match the largest possible substring
|     (consistent with matching the entire containing expression), the
|     non-greedy variants match the smallest possible substring
|     (consistent with matching the entire containing expression).
|    
|     For example, the regular expression 'c[ad]*a' when applied to
|     the string 'cdaaada' matches the whole string; but the regular
|     expression 'c[ad]*?a', applied to that same string, matches just
|     'cda'. (The smallest possible match here for '[ad]*?' that
|     permits the whole expression to match is 'd'.)
`---------------------------------------------------------------------


-- 
cheers,
Thorsten